When a wireless device receives a regular, or unencrypted e-mail message from a mail server, typically the mail server scans the message and extracts all attachment headers and sends them to the device along with the first small chunk of the body of the message. This means that when the device receives the initial data for an e-mail message, even though the device may only have data for a small portion of the e-mail message, it immediately knows what attachments are available in the message, since the attachment headers (typically consisting of the attachment filenames and content types) are enough for the user to know what attachments are associated with the message.
In the case of encrypted messages, the mail server is unable to decrypt the contents of the message to scan for the attachment headers is it does not have appropriate decryption keys as only the sender and receiver are able to decrypt any messages.
A typical e-mail message format looks like:    Body    Attachment header 1    Attachment 1 data    Attachment header 2    Attachment 2 data
Therefore, a device that has only received a portion, such as provided by mail servers of an encrypted e-mail message may only see the body of the e-mail message, or just the first attachment (but not necessarily the 2nd), or just the first two attachments, (but not the third), etc, depending on how much data the device has received for the message. This may be a particular problem for mail protocols designed to conserve resources of the wireless device, such as bandwidth and memory, by not downloading all of the message if not requested to do so by the user. For example, in the LEMONADE profile, Enhancements to Internet email to Support Diverse Service Environments, defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in RFC 2550, e-mails may be forwarded without being downloaded to the mobile device to conserve bandwidth and device resources. If attachment #1 is very large, for example 5 Megabytes (MB), then the device would have to download all 5 MB of attachment #1 before it could see the attachment #2, which may be unreasonable to do for the device in many cases. The attachments may not be downloaded or viewed by the user unless the entire message is received by the wireless device. Unknowingly forwarding attachments can be a serious security issue when the user is not aware of the existence of all attachments and content.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved system and method of forwarding e-mails from a wireless device where the e-mail has associated attachments.
It will be noted that throughout the appended drawings, like features are identified by like reference numerals.